The Real Reason Welfare Should End

Welfare Rests on a Fallacy and a Myth

Professor Levin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at City College and The Graduate Center of The City University, New York, New York.

Welfare should end, but not for the usual reasons. The Right has long held, and the Left is coming reluctantly to agree, that welfare creates a culture of dependency, sapping the initiative of its recipients. In the slums right now a generation of illegitimate children raised fatherless on Aid to Families with Dependent Children is being encouraged by welfare to produce the next generation.

Welfare no doubt has this effect, but what is wrong with welfare is not that it harms its recipients—lack of ambition is no burden if ambition is not needed for survival—but its moral outrageousness.

Let us try, for once, to see welfare not from the perspective of its recipients, but from the perspective of those who finance it. By what right can someone who works for a living, who has his own family to worry about, be required to support somebody else, or, what is worse, somebody else’s illegitimate child? And forced the taxpayer is. Should he deduct from his tax payment the proportion the government will use for welfare, he is given a jail sentence, not a lecture on charity.

I am willing to grant that everyone is obliged to help the unfortunate, and that indifference to this obligation is a character defect. But compassion and charity are not the issue. The issue is forcible fulfillment of the duty of charity, or someone’s idea of what this duty entails. Let those who feel obligated to support the abandoned illegitimate children of strangers do so. But leave others to wrestle with their consciences as they see fit.

This is a democracy, and the majority, which evidently does feel this obligation, has acted on it by passing the laws that created welfare entitlements. But that does not make the laws right. Forcing someone to support the illegitimate children of strangers is wrong even when the forcing is done by a majority.

As soon as anyone voices a wish to eliminate welfare, a sort of hostage situation is created, wherein welfare advocates raise the prospect of illegitimate children born to poor women. It is asked what will happen to these misbegotten children if “we” do not care for them—with the implication that it will be “our” fault if they starve.

First of all, no one seriously doubts that there would be fewer illegitimate babies than there are now if it were made clear well in advance that on a certain date welfare—AFDC, food stamps, subsidized housing, the lot—was going to end.

But let us imagine an unmarried woman so uninformed and improvident that, without giving thought to how she might be supported were she to become pregnant, consents to intercourse, and does bear a child. If the conservative’s deus ex machina, “charity,” does not arrive on schedule, the child starves. But responsibility for assuring that the child does not starve presumably resides with whoever is responsible for the child itself. The mother is responsible, and so is the father; by all means let us make the father support his offspring. But I am not responsible. I didn’t impregnate the woman, or force her to have sex. Why then should I be forced to take care of it?

“How can you be so concerned with `responsibility’ and laying blame when a child is starving?” The answer is that I have to be concerned, or else I’m going to continue to help support that child as well as my own.

When “welfare reform” is undertaken for the wrong reasons, the reforms inevitably go in the wrong direction. The most appalling revelation about the plan submitted by Bill Clinton to “end welfare as we know it” is that its cost exceeds that of the welfare we know! The Clintonites make no bones of their enthusiasm for job training, childcare, and other new entitlements to encourage “independence.” In practice, this means that instead of merely having to support the illegitimate child of a stranger, the taxpayer will have to support daycare and the stranger’s vocational training as well.

We Are Individuals

Welfare rests on a fallacy and a myth. The fallacy is what logicians call Composition, reasoning from properties of the parts of a whole to properties of the whole. I am responsible for my children, you for yours; in this sense we are all responsible for our children. But then this “we” is surreptitiously interpreted to mean all of us collectively, so that “our” children become all children taken together. Suddenly “America” must take care of “its” children, and then, only a little less suddenly, everyone who can pay is paying for everybody’s children.

Reinforcing this fallacy is the myth that We Are All In This Together, that we all share each other’s fate. We don’t. We are separate persons, families, clans, and groups, pursuing our various ends. We can and should cooperate, and—sometimes, not always—offer help in adversity. But we are all individually responsible for our fates, a responsibility that cannot be undone by forcing some people to pay for the heedlessness of others.

THE FREEMAN

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CURRENT ISSUE

December 2014

Unfortunately, educating people about phenomena that are counterintuitive, not-so-easy to remember, and suggest our individual lack of human control (for starters) can seem like an uphill battle in the war of ideas. So we sally forth into a kind of wilderness, an economic fairyland. We are myth busters in a world where people crave myths more than reality. Why do they so readily embrace untruth? Primarily because the immediate costs of doing so are so low and the psychic benefits are so high.